Corruption of Power

by Brenda English

  With that, I left—some might say fled—and nearly fell over Bill, still sitting in the hall. Without a word he stood up, took my arm, and steered me down the hall to the small lunchroom at the opposite end, next to the briefing room.

  I was practically sputtering in frustration. This wasn’t going well. Something about me pushed all of Noah Lansing’s buttons, but I had no idea what. I knew plenty of cops who didn’t care much for reporters, but they usually weren’t hostile for no reason. I hoped Bill could give me a reading on Lansing that would help me get a handle on this thing before it got completely out of control. Who knew how often I would have to cover a case he was working?

  Five

  In the lunchroom, empty at the moment, Bill left me at the last of the four tables, walked over to a coffee vending machine, put in some coins, pressed a few buttons, and got two cups of black coffee in return. A lot of cops these days are into fitness and healthier foods and turn their noses up at overcooked vending-machine coffee. But Bill said once that he had been drinking coffee that could stand on its own two feet too long to change his ways now. He walked back over and put down the cups, a grin on his face. I could have slugged him.

  “Is round one over?” he asked smugly, sitting down across the table.

  “What an asshole,” I huffed, dropping into the chair next to me. “What is his problem, anyway?”

  “What’s the matter, McPhee? Finally met someone who’s a match for you in the sharp-tongue department?” Bill was enjoying this far too much.

  “Boy, he just flayed me alive in there, and I don’t even know the guy! And for that matter, he doesn’t know me.

  What’s with him? And would you stop laughing at me?”

  Bill sobered, a little.

  “I’m sorry, Sutton. I just don’t get to see you bested very often. I would have warned you if I’d had a chance, but there hasn’t been time. He just came on board a couple of weeks ago, and this is his first big case. I knew you and Lansing would be like oil and water.”

  “What are you, some kind of psychic?”

  “No, but I know you, and I know his story. Any idiot could figure out you wouldn’t get along.”

  “And just why not, pray tell, oh wiseass… excuse me, wise one?”

  “Because of his wife.”

  So much for the wedding-ring observation… and my hormones.

  “His wife? What’s the matter? She doesn’t like him working with female reporters? Is she the jealous type?” My sarcasm was in full force by now, mostly because I was so angry at myself for letting Lansing make me lose my cool.

  “No, the dead type. And Lansing blames a smart-ass woman newspaper reporter like you for it.” For all his easygoing manner, Bill knew how to go for the jugular when he thought it was called for.

  “Aw, shit,” I said, sitting back in the chair as muddied waters cleared. “Well, you sure let me get blindsided with that one. What happened?”

  Bill no longer looked amused. “It was in Virginia Beach, where Lansing worked before coming here. Maybe five years ago,” he said.

  “Lansing was working undercover on a drug case. One night he was in a bar with some hard-core coke-dealer types and ran into a reporter who had worked at the paper in Charlottesville when Lansing was in graduate school at UVA and worked for the campus police. She had dealt with him two or three times on stories, so when she moved to the Norfolk paper and saw him in the bar, she recognized him. Lansing apparently had to hint around at what he was doing to shut her up before she gave him away. She seemed to think it was pretty funny, and said it would make great headlines. She didn’t let on that night in the bar that he was a cop, but two weeks later the paper ran a series by another reporter about drug trafficking in the whole Hampton Roads area and pretty much said that the police had managed to plant at least one undercover cop in the drug ring’s inner circle. Lansing wasn’t named, but his superiors immediately pulled him out, and I guess someone put it all together. A few days later his wife was abducted from the parking lot of a grocery store. They found her body three days later. She had been beaten, raped repeatedly, and then shot. Her body was thrown out in a park, where it was meant to be found easily, obviously as a message.”

  I felt ill.

  “She and Lansing had a baby, a little boy, and he’s been raising the kid alone ever since. From what I hear from Virginia Beach, he was crazy about his wife, and what happened nearly killed him with grief. Apparently he blamed himself. I guess it was the kid who kept him going.”

  That explained the little boy on the sailboat, I supposed, and Noah Lansing’s reaction to me. It also underscored why my mother always told me I was far too quick to sit in judgment of people. She was right, as usual, and now I felt like something that had crawled out from under a rock—or one of the supermarket tabloids. But I didn’t have the luxury of sitting around feeling sorry for myself.

  “Okay,” I asked Bill, “how do I begin to repair this? I have to have access to this guy.”

  “Just be straightforward,” Bill advised, standing up and crumpling his empty coffee cup, “and maybe cool the smart mouth a little, at least around him. I’ll do some smoothing of the waters behind the scene. I can’t guarantee you’ll get anything special, but you won’t be shut out. Lansing is a professional, too, and I really don’t think he wants you out for his blood. Nobody in their right mind would.”

  Nor did I want to be. In spite of my urge to strangle him a few minutes earlier, there was something about Noah Lansing that made me want him to see me in a halfway positive light.

  “Something” as in hormones, maybe? I ignored my impertinent questioner.

  “And Sutton,” Bill said, “there’s one more thing I’d better tell you.”

  I groaned, knowing I wasn’t going to want to hear this either.

  “Tom Coster has moved over to our special-operations unit,” he went on. Coster was the detective who was handling the Ann Kane case.

  “So who’s going to cover Ann Kane?” I asked, and then I knew the answer. “No, please don’t tell me. Not him.”

  “Right, Noah Lansing has that one, too.”

  “Well, that’s great,” I muttered, having visions of Rob Perry berating me over a blank computer screen, uninterested in my explanation for why I had no stories for him. “Just great!” It looked like I would be running into Noah Lansing every way I turned. This was quickly becoming an untenable situation. I had to at least make an effort to fix things.

  I walked over to the coffee machine, put in some coins, and got a second cup of coffee. I picked up my things from the table and followed Bill back out into the hall. At the door into the lobby, he reached to open it for me.

  “Hold on just one minute,” I said, and went down the hall instead, back to Lansing’s office.

  “Sutton,” Bill called after me, exasperated, “what are you doing?”

  I stepped inside Lansing’s door. He was standing, his back to me, looking out the window, his suit jacket in his right hand and thrown over his shoulder. I could tell his mind was someplace far away, so I cleared my throat.

  He turned, dropping the jacket down to his side, his eyes cutting like a knife through the space between us, either because his thoughts had been interrupted or because he realized it was me, or both. I didn’t give him time to say anything. I put the coffee cup on his desk.

  “A peace offering,” I explained quickly. “I really don’t want to have to fight with you just to do my job.”

  For just a fraction of a second the anger in his eyes turned into something else, a look that I could have sworn was pain. He opened his mouth to speak, but I was already going back out the door and down the hall. Bill, who was still standing there, swept open the lobby door, ushered me through it, on through the lobby, and out the front door, where he stopped.

  “You’re incorrigible, you know,” he said, shaking a finger at me.

  “It’s why you love me so,” I responded, waving airily as I walked off to my car, asking
myself why Lansing had to be so damned good-looking and intelligent, too. Graduate school, no less!

  Six

  Ken Hale and Rob Perry were deep in conversation up at the news desk when I walked into the newsroom. Ken, who was facing my way, motioned me over. I went ahead to my desk to put away my things and saw that my voice-mail light was blinking frantically, its usual state. It’ll have to wait, I thought, and went over to join Rob and Ken.

  “Anything from the cops?” Rob asked, knowing I usually was up and out early to talk with Bill Russell and to put in an appearance at one or two police stations. It helped me find out what had happened overnight and also helped me develop sources. Familiarity can breed loose lips as well as contempt.

  “Lansing says they’ll have the autopsy results sometime today or tomorrow,” I answered. “I’ll have them about as fast as he does.”

  Ken raised an eyebrow in question, but I just smiled confidently. I had learned long ago and the hard way not to reveal how I got information, even to another reporter, except under very exceptional circumstances. It was about the same time I learned that the most important people to cultivate in any office are usually the worker bees—the secretaries, the clerks, the people who answer the phones or open the mail. These people usually are the least appreciated in any office and often are the ones who know as much as or more about what goes on than the bosses do. I make every effort to be friendly, to treat them with respect, and occasionally to do favors for them. I have sources everywhere—the courthouses, the phone company, the local hospitals. My respect for the people who really make the world work makes any number of them more than happy to tell me what they know when I need to know it. Like I did now.

  Cheryl Wiggins was a good example. A transcriptionist in the Northern Virginia Medical Examiner’s Office, Cheryl had a boss she didn’t like. She also had a college-age daughter who would be working as a summer intern at our rival, the Post, in part because I had put in a good word for her with their assistant vice-president for human resources. He had been the personnel director at the Democrat in Tallahassee, back when I was a reporter there and back when people’s job titles actually told you what they did. Cheryl had become my best pipeline into the world of medical examining, not only for timely updates on causes of death, but also on frequently interesting tidbits about other things found during an autopsy, things that didn’t necessarily contribute to the death but that were important pieces in the picture of how and why someone died. I made a mental note to call her.

  “Oh, yeah,” I added, looking back at Ken. “They’re also going to be bringing Hub Taylor in for some more questioning sometime today.”

  “That’s what I heard, too,” Ken replied. From a lot of other reporters, a comment like that would require a tiring little round of “I Can Top You.” Ken was a solid reporter, who didn’t play those kinds of games because he didn’t have to.

  “I called Mannie Sims to try to get an interview with Taylor,” he went on to explain. “He said Taylor is staying at Ed Lloyd’s house until after the funeral and that he won’t be available today because he has to go in to talk with the police.”

  “When’s the funeral?” Rob asked.

  “Tomorrow, if the medical examiner gets done in time. The Taylors go to a Methodist church in McLean. Willow Hill Methodist, I think. They’re having the funeral there. Mannie said they’re letting only the family and close friends in, no press. But I suppose I’d better go anyway, even if it’s just to stand around outside.”

  Rob nodded in agreement. “So what will I have coming from the two of you for tomorrow morning’s paper?” he asked. Just as reporters have to, Rob always is thinking at least twenty-four hours ahead in addition to whatever moment he’s actually in. His job—and ours—require it, but it sometimes makes for rather schizophrenic thinking. At any one time you’re dealing with the fallout from your story in this morning’s paper, you’re trying to be in four places at once to cover what’s going on today, and you’re worrying about what kind of story you’ll have for the next day’s edition and whether your competition will have your tomorrow story in their pages today. It’s no wonder Rob has three ex-wives and he dresses funny. And he isn’t the only one in the newsroom who fits that description.

  “Well, I’ll have the autopsy results,” I told him, “and anything I can get on Hub Taylor’s police interrogation.”

  “And I’m doing a profile of both the Taylors,” Ken added. “I’ve gotten quotes from a couple of fund-raiser types about how much Janet Taylor’s death will hurt their efforts. She could talk money out of a stone, and some of these charities were pretty dependent on what she brought in, and what she contributed herself. Somehow, I suspect Hub may not be as generous with the money as his late wife was.”

  Rob looked down at his shoes, put his right hand on his hip, and used his left hand to squeeze his forehead into a giant wrinkle in the middle. It was Rob’s classic I’m-thinking-about-what-you-said-but-you-could-make-me-happier stance.

  “Okay,” he said finally, dropping his hand from his face and looking back up at us. “I’ll put them in the lineup. But I gotta tell you, they don’t sound real exciting. If you come up with something better, let me know ASAP.” What went without saying was that he shortly had a noon editors’ meeting in Mack Thompson’s office, where he would have to lay on the table his stories for tomorrow’s issue, including any we were contributing to page one, and he probably would have to take a lot of heat from Mark Lester, who was chomping at the bit to take the Janet Taylor murder away from us. Editors sometimes have to fight for space for stories they aren’t writing and haven’t seen. And editors like nothing better than congenially ripping each other to shreds. So when your editor puts his (or her) gonads on the chopping block for your upcoming story, you had damned well better produce.

  Rob turned and walked to the back of the newsroom, probably to go to the cafeteria for coffee to fortify himself for the editors’ meeting. A lot of reporters and editors overindulge in alcohol: They have to find some way to counteract all the caffeine they consume during the day.

  Ken and I went back to our respective desks, where I knew the voice-mail light on my phone was still waiting.

  It was the usual cast of clowns with no perspective on reality. A guy from Springfield wanted me to investigate why the police were out to get him. He knew they were because they gave him three speeding tickets in a month. A real-estate agent in Mount Vernon was upset that the police had an officer assigned full-time to the high school there, which she worried would bring down property values. I wondered if I should call her and tell her about the undercover officers posing as students and staff. Then I got to the third message.

  The beep was followed by a hesitant male voice.

  “Ms. McPhee, I really need to talk with you in person. I… uh, I think I may know something about Ann Kane.” He paused for several beats. “But I don’t want to say any more to a recording. I’ll call you back.” I hit the button to listen to the message again. He sounded rational enough, the voice crisp, cultivated, but reluctant, maybe even a little afraid. I went on through the voice mail, only to hear two more calls that were hang-ups without messages. Probably the same guy, I thought. It was frustrating, but since he had left no name or number, all I could do was wait for him to call again. In the meantime I still needed to reach Cheryl Wiggins about Janet Taylor’s autopsy.

  Cheryl was in. We had agreed on a pseudonym for me to use when I was calling to get information from her. I identified myself to the receptionist as Miss Lane (as in Lois Lane, my little private joke) and Cheryl came on the line immediately.

  “I’ll bet I know why you’re calling,” she said in greeting.

  “It’s pretty obvious,” I agreed. “I need Janet Taylor’s results as soon as you can call me with them.”

  “No problem. They’re finishing up now, and I’ll be getting the tape to transcribe into the computer. In a case like this, Dr. Riner usually calls the police with the result
s as soon as the autopsy is done, but I can call you when I go out to lunch and let you know what the report said.”

  “Thanks, Cheryl. I owe you one. And if I’m not here for any reason, leave it on my voice mail. Nobody can access it but me. You’ve got my direct number?”

  “I do.”

  “Talk to you later. And thanks again.” We hung up, and the instant I replaced the receiver, the phone rang.

  “Sutton McPhee,” I answered, snatching it back up.

  “Ms. McPhee?” I recognized the caller as the mystery voice from my message. It wasn’t difficult. On the police beat, I don’t deal with many people who speak with the sounds of a Boston Brahmin background.

  “Yes, hi. I’m glad you called back. Who are you?”

  “I’ll tell you that when I see you, Ms. McPhee. Could we meet? I really need to talk to somebody about this, and I don’t think I can go to the police.”

  “Where and when? I can meet you right now.” If this guy really did know something about how or why Ann Kane died, I didn’t want to take a chance on his getting spooked and disappearing or calling another reporter. This could be the first and only break I—or anyone else—might get in her death. And while Rob had told us to forget any stories other than Janet Taylor’s murder, I knew better than to let this chance pass. I would just neglect to mention it to him until I had something I could nail down and that he couldn’t be mad at me for.

  “I think my office might actually be the best place,” the caller said. “We close from twelve-thirty until two, and my staff is going out today for a birthday party for my office manager. I’ll be here alone.”

  “That’s fine. What’s the name of your company and where do I find you?”

  “It’s in Vienna… Maple Avenue. Do you know it?”

  “I know where Maple Avenue is.”

  “Okay, the office is at 397 Maple Avenue West, Suite 104. Come at twelve forty-five. That will give my staff time to leave. The office door will be locked, but just knock and I’ll let you in.”